Flatten an irregular list of lists

Question

Yes, I know this subject has been covered before (here, here, here, here), but as far as I know, all solutions, except for one, fail on a list like this:

L = [[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]], 6]

Where the desired output is

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Or perhaps even better, an iterator. The only solution I saw that works for an arbitrary nesting is found in this question:

def flatten(x):
    result = []
    for el in x:
        if hasattr(el, "__iter__") and not isinstance(el, basestring):
            result.extend(flatten(el))
        else:
            result.append(el)
    return result

flatten(L)

Is this the best model? Did I overlook something? Any problems?

Answer 1

totally hacky but I think it would work (depending on your data_type)

flat_list = ast.literal_eval("[%s]"%re.sub("[\[\]]","",str(the_list)))

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this is necessarily quicker or more effective, but this is what I do:

def flatten(lst):
    return eval('[' + str(lst).replace('[', '').replace(']', '') + ']')

L = [[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5]], 6]
print(flatten(L))

The flatten function here turns the list into a string, takes out all of the square brackets, attaches square brackets back onto the ends, and turns it back into a list.

Although, if you knew you would have square brackets in your list in strings, like [[1, 2], "[3, 4] and [5]"], you would have to do something else.

Answer 3

Without using any library:

def flat(l):
    def _flat(l, r):    
        if type(l) is not list:
            r.append(l)
        else:
            for i in l:
                r = r + flat(i)
        return r
    return _flat(l, [])



# example
test = [[1], [[2]], [3], [['a','b','c'] , [['z','x','y']], ['d','f','g']], 4]    
print flat(test) # prints [1, 2, 3, 'a', 'b', 'c', 'z', 'x', 'y', 'd', 'f', 'g', 4]

Answer 4

Using generator functions can make your example a little easier to read and probably boost the performance.

Python 2

def flatten(l):
    for el in l:
        if isinstance(el, collections.Iterable) and not isinstance(el, basestring):
            for sub in flatten(el):
                yield sub
        else:
            yield el

I used the Iterable ABC added in 2.6.

Python 3

In Python 3, the basestring is no more, but you can use a tuple of str and bytes to get the same effect there.

The yield from operator returns an item from a generator one at a time. This syntax for delegating to a subgenerator was added in 3.3

def flatten(l):
    for el in l:
        if isinstance(el, collections.Iterable) and not isinstance(el, (str, bytes)):
            yield from flatten(el)
        else:
            yield el

Answer 5

def flatten(xs):
    res = []
    def loop(ys):
        for i in ys:
            if isinstance(i, list):
                loop(i)
            else:
                res.append(i)
    loop(xs)
    return res

Answer 6

I'm new to python and come from a lisp background. This is what I came up with (check out the var names for lulz):

def flatten(lst):
    if lst:
        car,*cdr=lst
        if isinstance(car,(list,tuple)):
            if cdr: return flatten(car) + flatten(cdr)
            return flatten(car)
        if cdr: return [car] + flatten(cdr)
        return [car]

Seems to work. Test:

flatten((1,2,3,(4,5,6,(7,8,(((1,2)))))))

returns:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1, 2]